A Humberside Police spokeswoman said
Editing to add today the next day:
https://twitter.com/HarryTheOwl/status/1111150160632078336
Hull Daily Mail has the full statement from the Humberside police about their Friendly Conversation with Harry:
A Humberside Police spokeswoman said: “A phone call was made to the complainant by Inspector Wilson to update him on his complaint to the Force, which is standard procedure.”
So far so good. “Phoning to update you on your complaint, sir.” Fine; proceed.
“There was never any suggestion he shouldn’t engage in politics or debate around the subject in question, he was just asked why he would want to, knowing it would cause distress and upset to others in society.
“The complainant was also advised if he felt his Human Rights had been breached, he may want to seek legal advice.”
Mkay. The thing is…the police, being the police, must be well aware that what they say to members of the public while on duty is perceived as…coming from the police. You know? I can’t quite figure out how to make it clearer, or why they need it made clearer, when it’s the whole point of them. They’re not phoning Harry as the victim of a crime but as the perp of a non-crime but all the same they are looking into it wink wink nudge nudge. I have trouble understanding why they think it will pass muster to say “never any suggestion” and then go on to say the rest. The cops don’t have any idle curiosity about the motives of random citizens. They don’t; they have too much other stuff to do. There is no reason a cop would ask “But why would you want to?” apart from an attempt to discourage the subject from continuing his legal but “upsetting” practice of discussing political subjects.
It is especially terrifying given the current trajectory of our politics and the slavering thirst by government for personal data of all kinds.
In a few days, according to law, we British will have to prove our age when accessing sites judged to be ‘adult’. This means proving our identity. I have problems with porn as I’ve made clear here on several occasions but I also have problems with people having to register with government or firms acting on our government’s behalf to access porn or anything else. That information isn’t safe. It can and will be stolen and used to hurt people. And don’t believe for a moment that age verification won’t immediately suffer from feature creep, it is terrifying.
It’s not as though it will work anyway. I for one will continue to spoof my IP address at all times as I have for the last 20 years or so.
latsot, one of my books is listed for adults only because it contains some pretty nasty graphic violence and descriptions of ordinary sex acts; it is not porn by any stretch of the imagination, but still requires verification of age. So when I log on to the publisher’s site, I must put in my birthdate. It immediately lets me in without asking me for verification. Any kid who can do simple arithmetic could easily access it by putting in a birthdate not their own.
I’m not sure how online verification would be able to ‘prove’ anything…fingerprint scans? Retina scans? Blood samples? Copies of driver’s licenses, it seems, would be easily faked, because you could always get the license from an older person who is not going to use theirs to access porn. It looks to me like what I have seen is mostly just CYA for the companies, sort of an “I told them I wouldn’t do that if I were them”.
The UK age verification scheme hasn’t been thought through at all, even though it is supposed to begin next month. The idea is that one has to prove one’s identity… including the possibility of visiting an actual physical place to hand over a passport or something in exchange for a physical token. Or verifying a credit card with… pornhub. Seriously.
The UK government has farmed this job out to the non-gov body that certifies films and so on. Read that correctly: the exact body that was created to prevent the government from censoring things is now in charge of… well, you get the picture.
And since that body has absolutely no funding to do any of this, nothing has been done. No protocol has been established, no thought has been given to the fact that people’s porn preferences *will* be stolen, made public and used by government and law enforcement.
And all the while children will be at least as adept as I am at avoiding those controls anyway. It isn’t and can’t ever be very difficult.
Hell, I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s why the vast majority of cops become cops in the first place.
Screechy, every cop I’ve known personally has had at least somewhat of a lean toward authoritarianism in their personality, so yeah, I’d agree with you.
I was just telling him that he had a nice little shop and that I thought it would be unfortunate if anything were to happen to it. What’s so wrong about that?
All I did was ask him whether he wanted to wipe that smirk off his face. I was just curious about his intentions.
I was simply wondering whether he was aware of how fast he was going.
(How disingenuous can the cops be? Or how stupid can they think we are?)
I don’t think it’s that they think we’re stupid; quite the opposite. I think they believe we understand completely, and want us to do that. They want the intimidation. The excuses, I think, come about because they also believe they are untouchable, so they try to get away with stuff and then when people question them, they can’t say what they were really doing. Well, it was just a little intimidation tactic designed to make him quit doing this thing I didn’t want him to do, that’s all. I was just putting some weight against him hoping he’d do things differently, because I know the cops have an intimidation factor just by being cops. That’s all. They can’t say that, so they make up the first thing that comes to mind, because there really is no other reason why they’re doing it. I don’t think they expect us to believe it, but I do think they expect we will back off, because they are the cops, goddamit. I’ve seen military guys do the same thing – think they are untouchable because everyone is so mushy about how much they protect us (with cops, I don’t think they think we’re mushy, I think they think we’re scared).
In my fair city we couldn’t get anyone to arrest a guy swinging a sword and yelling to himself down by the waterfront. Ditto on any (of the) time(s) your car gets broken into. (White) guys can protest carrying an assault rifle. A different brand of community policing it would appear.
‘Wasting police time’ is an offence in English law. Inspector Wilson is clearly in breach of that law, so can we expect an arrest?
Ben @6,
I’ve forgotten it now, and it’s not clear to me how to google it, so maybe someone here can enlighten me, but during the height of ElevatorGate, I learned a pretty useful concept. (Or rather, learned the name for it; it’s one of those things we all understand intuitively.) It’s a sort of “plausible deniability” in which a particular comment or question has a generally understood meaning but also a more limited literal one, and we oscillate between the two depending on which is socially easier.
So in the context of ElevatorGate, some trolls were insisting “all he did was ask her for coffee! Coffee is just coffee, it’s not sex! You’re the ones injecting sex into it!” Many people explained patiently why that was bullshit, at least in the context of a hotel elevator at 3 am, but of course the Super Skeptics pretended not to understand how language and human mating rituals work. Someone — not sure if it was a linguist or psychologist or some other background — explained that this is an established concept in their field. You invite your date to your place late at night for coffee, or to “view your etchings” or watch Netflix or whatever, and it’s generally understood that it’s an invitation to at least the possibility of some sort of sexual activity, but you phrase it that way because if the answer is no, you can pretend (and your date will graciously allow you to pretend) that she just wasn’t interested in coffee/etchings/Netflix, rather than the more personal rejection that you both know it was. In that context, it’s a sort of polite social fiction that allows the person extending the invite to save face, and the person declining it to play along that no feelings were hurt. (Which doesn’t mean it’s always appropriate, e.g. in a hotel elevator at 3 am)
But of course there are less polite or benevolent applications of these double meanings. And so you have cops who know damn well that the conversation carries an implicit threat of them using their authority against you, who then fall back on the more literal we-were-just-having-a-chat interpretation, and expect you to go along with it.
I Googled it by searching for “Steven Pinker” and “If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome.” That found this lecture where Pinker calls it an “indirect speech act”:
https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU
I know I have a different experience with cops than many, but I’ve never really been intimidated by or afraid of them. When I was a kid we had “Officer Friendly” come to our school every year and tell us about police work and how the police were our friends and were there to help the community. I guess I was stupid enough to really believe it, ha. I also violated speeding laws incessantly in my youth, so that gave me lots of opportunities to have conversations with the police. Occasionally one would be grumpy or a bit of a jerk, but not really any more than most people.
So I guess I’m less quick to jump to “police intimidation” in this situation. The police got some complaints, and they want to defuse the situation, so they talk to everyone involved. “Hey, you’re doing X, it’s upsetting this person, so could you maybe stop?” In limerick criminal’s own telling, they were very clear when asked that he wasn’t doing anything illegal and they weren’t saying he had to stop. Police often do this kind of thing if neighbors are squabbling or whatever. They would prefer to get everyone calmed down and not have to cite or arrest anyone. I don’t necessarily agree with the notion that police should stay away unless someone’s clearly breaking the law.
And, yeah, the original complaint was really stupid and the police should have just told the complainer that they weren’t going to pursue the matter. But since then it all seems like friendly discussions. If I had the same idea that any interaction with the police was automatically Very Serious, I’m sure I’d feel differently though.
Skeletor, sometimes diffusing the situation means explaining to the one who is complaining that the limerick criminal isn’t actually breaking any laws. It means explaining that people have a right to their own opinions. It may mean not jumping all over every single complaint.
After all, they do that all the time when women are threatened by men. Sorry, can’t do anything unless he, like, actually attacks you. Call back once you’re actually bleeding or dead, then we can help.
So, no, I don’t buy that just trying to diffuse things between neighbors. Not the way it works. The police do have to make a decision about what is legitimate and what isn’t, and posting (or liking) limericks is not in the criminal zone in any non-despotic country. It isn’t about what sort of experience you (or in this case, Harry) has had with the police, but about what sort of behavior we should be able to expect from the police, and not calling and interrogating (nice? Maybe, but still interrogation) someone for hurting the feelings of another human being. Not threatening, not inciting, not anything but just hurting someone’s feelings.
In Great Britain, they have hate speech laws, and the police have been trained for this–by trans advocates, who no doubt sell them a load of goods about how many trans folks are driven to suicide every day by the upsetting invalidating words of terfs.
So I don’t just blame the cops here. They’ve been fed the same dishonest propaganda being spread to everyone from young schoolchildren to politicians.
@screechy:
They certainly did. One of them was Dawkins.
@Lady M:
True, but they are supposed to be capable of using common sense.
@iknklast:
Further to your point, now that I have time.
Actually, there’s no need to go anywhere near that far. It’s very easy to spoof your IP address so that you appear to be outside the UK. You don’t even need any technical knowledge: using a VPN or the Tor browser will do it. It is an enormous effort for something that is laughably easy to defeat and will have mostly negative consequences.
Hilariously, there’s some sort of meme going around which encourages people to change the date on their Twitter profile to 2007 in order to see some brilliant easter egg. But all it does is suspend your account for being under age for Twitter.
Yesterday’s SMBC was about age verification for porn access:
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/eighteen
Ha! Yes, I forgot to mention that.